Stage Motherhood

My son, the star.

Jacob Kogan with Vera Fermiga on the set of “Joshua,” in which he plays the title character. Photograph by Sylvia Plachy.

On the morning of his première at the Sundance Film Festival, in January, my son was escorted from a Park City TV station, where he’d just been interviewed, into a white S.U.V. waiting to drive him to a photo shoot for People. “This is Jacob Kogan,” one of the film’s publicists said to the driver. “He’s the star of ‘Joshua.’ ” Gesturing toward me, she added, “And this is his mother? Manager?”

“I’m his mother,” I said. “He doesn’t have a manager.” My son is eleven; “Joshua” is his first film. The only managing he normally requires I have covered: pediatrician appointments, the occasional hot meal, a new pair of sneakers every six to nine months.

The publicist rolled her eyes and slammed her door shut. “Whatever.”

Our car made its way down Main Street, through the crowds of filmmak-ers, dealmakers, and cinéastes, everyone dressed identically in denim and goose down. Jacob squeezed my hand for support, as if he were the parent protecting the child. He’d noticed how people reacted when I introduced myself as his mother, the way that they seemed, sometimes, to look through me. “My mom writes books,” he told the publicist.

“Mm-hmm,” she replied.

“Don’t worry about it,” I whispered to him. “It doesn’t bother me.”

A few months before “Joshua” started shooting, a film-director friend of mine tried to warn me: “You do understand that every single person on that set will hate you?” What could I say? I’ve read the tabloid tales of Macaulay Culkin and Lindsay Lohan; I’ve seen “Gypsy.” In the opening scene of the movie, a gaggle of stage mothers pounce on Karl Malden, demanding pink spotlights and special treatment for their cherubs. “Mothers, would you please get out! Get off the stage!” the theatre owner bellows. Then Rosalind Russell blasts through the doors, a bulldozer in leopard print, shouting, “Sing out, Louise! Sing out!”

When people ask how Jacob got into acting, I take great pains to keep myself on the fringes of the narrative, which goes something like this: At the age of four, Jacob was asked by a casting agent, the mother of a child in his play group, to audition for a film by Lasse Hallström. Jacob made it to the final round of callbacks, but then the film lost its financing. I was mostly relieved, but my son was hooked. For the next three years, he begged to be allowed to audition for another film. I consulted my friend Fran, a child psychologist, who pointed out that if Jacob were demanding soccer lessons with such unrelenting fervor I would probably let him play. “It’s not about you anymore,” she said. “Seven is the age of reason. He knows what he wants.”

I signed him up for musical-theatre classes at the Y. I clapped loudly when he performed in his school play. But I drew the line at professional acting. He was too young, I told him. Then one day my husband, Paul, received a videotape in the mail. It was a copy of the 1971 Russian film “Telegramma,” directed by Rolan Bykov, and starring Paul and his twin brother, George. Bykov was a friend of Paul’s mother, Raya, who was raising the boys in Moscow on her own. When Raya lost her job and became a refusenik after applying for asylum under Brezhnev, Bykov cast the boys in his film. (They shared a role.) I had never seen it; neither had Jacob.

“Look,” Paul said, pointing to the five-year-old boy peering out from the screen. “That’s me! Or maybe it’s George, I’m not sure.”

Jacob stood in front of the television, transfixed. He couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue, but he followed that little boy and his story all the way through to the Cyrillic credits. Then he turned around and stared at me, hard.

“That was different,” I said. “Daddy had to act if he wanted to eat.”

“Let him audition,” my husband said. “What’s the big deal?”

I finally relented. I sent three snapshots of Jacob—which he’d picked out himself—to an agent, along with a passive-aggressive letter explaining that while my son wanted to be an actor, I thought it was a really bad idea, but if she wanted to try to convince me otherwise we would be happy to meet with her.

Six months later, Jacob and I flew to Los Angeles for his first callback, for a sitcom pilot. We sat in a crammed waiting room on the Paramount lot with three other boys, all of whom looked remarkably like Jacob: same neatly cut light-brown hair, same pale skin and soft features. All of the boys were accompanied by their mothers, and one had a manager in tow. When the manager found out that Jacob and I lived in New York, he tried to impress us. “My good friend Ally Sheedy lives in New York,” he said. “You know her?”

The four boys eyed one another warily, then made their way into the center of the room to swap Gameboys. Three hours later, we were all still there, awaiting a decision, when the boys’ stomachs began to grumble. The manager stepped out for provisions and returned with two bags of groceries, which he proceeded to offer only to his client.

“Those chips look good,” Jacob said.

“They are,” the manager replied, ignoring the hint. I figured this was his way of showing the less experienced stage mothers how much better off we’d be with him in our corner, like that sign near the Holland Tunnel that reads, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.”

Finally, two of the boys, including Jacob, were told that they’d be moving on to the Fox lot later that day for yet another round of callbacks. The other two would not. One of the boys who was eliminated was staying at the same hotel as Jacob and me, so I offered to drive him and his mother back there in the interim. He bawled in the back seat the entire ride. His mother sat in the passenger seat, lobbing tiny grenades of comfort and wisdom over her headrest. “It’s because you don’t have blue eyes,” she said curtly.

“But I wanted to get my handprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre!” the boy wailed.

His mother remained silent.

“Oh, sweetie,” I said, making contact with his unfortunate hazel eyes in the rearview mirror, “you have plenty of time to get your handprints in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese. You’re only eight! You have your whole career ahead of you.”

“No!” he shouted. “Not in the cement. I wanted to get the handprints they sell at the gift shop!” He stared angrily at the back of his mother’s head and began to cry harder.

His mother turned to me. “As if I’d spend forty dollars on a set of handprints if he doesn’t book the part,” she said.

I came home from that trip to L.A. resolved that Jacob could pursue his passion for acting only with four essential caveats: (1) no sitcoms, (2) no commercials, (3) no dumb films, and (4) no anything else that would ever have him relocating to Los Angeles. This left only independent features and New York-based shows like MTV2’s “Wonder Showzen”—a darkly funny sketch-comedy on which Jacob happily landed various recurring roles in the fall of 2004.

In early 2006, when Jacob was ten, the director George Ratliff began casting for “Joshua,” a psychological thriller that he wrote with his friend David Gilbert. The film is about a wealthy Manhattan couple, the Cairns, whose lives take a dark turn when they bring home a new sibling for their odd—and oddly cold—piano prodigy of a son, Joshua. Ratliff had already cast Vera Farmiga and Sam Rockwell as Joshua’s parents, but he didn’t have anyone for the title role. So he asked his friend John Lee, one of the creators of “Wonder Showzen,” for a short list of names.

When I got the call telling me that Jacob had booked the part, I was walking home from my writing studio, standing by a trash can on the corner of Chambers Street and West Broadway. I remember the trash can because I was newly pregnant and suffering from morning sickness, and I was glad to have it nearby. But it was the news of Jacob’s new role that had my stomach churning. As excited as I was for him, I was mortified by what it would mean for me.

Every mother has to grapple with duelling identities—I am Me; I am Someone’s Mother—but being a stage mother makes this conflict so explicit. When I left college, I spent a decade covering hard news, first as a war photographer and then as a television producer. After that, I turned to writing, publishing a book about those early experiences. Then I hit a five-year-long dry patch, during which I abandoned some six hundred pages of three partial novels. I finished the fourth just before my fortieth birthday. When it finally sold, after thirty-nine rejections, it was for the exact amount that Jacob would be paid for twenty-five days of shooting “Joshua.”

For the majority of stage mothers, the daily shuttling into the city from New Jersey or Long Island or Connecticut, or even from as far away as southern Pennsylvania, becomes the full-time career they left behind. And, as with any co-workers who’ve spent enough time together, clawing for scraps, strong bonds begin to form.

While their progeny are busy checking out the sign-up sheets at the entrance (“Ooh, she’s the one who booked that Chuck E. Cheese’s commercial last week!”), the mothers gather on stiff chairs and badly upholstered couches to trade information: Did you sign him up for tap lessons yet? He’ll get nowhere without them. Oh, look who’s here! Mr. C.S.I. himself. I heard he booked that film with what’s-her-name, from Nickelodeon. No, we’re not driving back until six. I know the Lincoln Tunnel will be a nightmare at that hour, but Chloe’s got an audition for “Law & Order” at five. Don’t use that guy—a thousand dollars he charges, and our head shots all came out blurry.

Some days, I can hide behind the screen of my laptop and tune it out. But most of the time I sit on those plastic chairs, my ears naked to the air, fielding questions from the other mothers—Who’s his agent? Does he have a manager? Where would I have seen him?—and counting the days until Jacob is old enough to travel on the subway by himself. And yet I know that when that day comes I’ll miss certain aspects of the adventure—travelling back and forth to auditions, sneaking in a hot chocolate when we can, running lines at the kitchen table in our pajamas, trying to puzzle out a character’s motivations, and therefore, unwittingly, our own.

The production company faxed us a copy of the five-week shooting schedule for “Joshua,” and of course the baby was due in the middle of it. I called my father, who’d just retired, and asked him to be on standby as Jacob’s on-set guardian. I figured that I could handle the other responsibilities: taking Jacob to his daily rehearsals and to the intensive piano lessons required by the director, making appointments for his haircut, costume fittings, and the mandatory doctor’s exam.

But my body had other ideas. My contractions began at thirty-one weeks, at which point I was hospitalized for several days, pumped full of terbutaline and various steroids for the baby’s lungs, and told, in no uncertain terms, that I was to stay in bed, where the painful contractions continued, unabated, until baby Leo was born, five and a half weeks later.

A few hours after Leo took his first breaths, I was applying pressure to a small mass on my forehead that had started bleeding during delivery—which a resident had assured me was not a stigmata but something called a pyogenic granuloma, unless it was melanoma, but not to worry—when one of the producers of “Joshua” called my cell phone. “We need an infant to play the role of Lily,” he said. Lily is the new baby who wreaks havoc on the Cairn family, and the producer and I had joked—joked!—when he hired Jacob that if my baby was born early he’d get a twofer.

“But I’m still in the hospital.”

“I know,” he said. But the youngest infants he could find were all three months old.

Of course they were, I thought. What kind of a crazy mother would hand a newborn over to a film crew? “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I just can’t do it.” At three days postpartum, I reminded him, my milk would just be coming in, an unpleasant day under the best of circumstances. When my husband visited the set the next day and called to try to persuade me, I was even more adamant. “You don’t seem to understand,” I said. “I’ve been contracting every five minutes for nearly six weeks straight, I can’t sit because of my stitches, and my forehead thinks we’re the Messiah.”

He handed the phone to Jacob, who was taking a break from shooting a scene where he tries to push his new baby sister down the steps of the Brooklyn Museum. “Please?” my son said. “It would mean a lot to me.”

Please? It would mean a lot to me? I felt as if I were on the soundstage of one of those sitcoms which I’d barred Jacob from auditioning for. The only thing missing was the laugh track. And so, the next day, I left the real hospital with my swaddled son and took him straight down to the fake hospital where he would play a girl in a fake scene that my older son had just lived in real life—meeting his new baby sibling. (Insert laugh track here.) When we walked onto the set, the prop master asked if I would mind putting a clip on my premature baby’s umbilical stump, to make him look more authentically newborn. Since his real clip had just been removed at the real hospital that morning, I couldn’t see why he shouldn’t wear a fake clip at the fake hospital.

When the scene was over, I tried to remove the clip from the end of the baby’s stump, but I couldn’t. At that point, the whole cast and crew had moved on to a different set, so there I sat, all alone, in increasingly severe postpartum pain, bleeding from the forehead, lactating all over my blouse, and pulling and tugging at a plastic clip that wouldn’t budge off my poor newborn’s now oozing umbilicus. Luckily, the fake-hospital set was on an abandoned floor of a real hospital, so I found my way to the real neonatal intensive-care unit and banged on the door. “Can you please get this off?” I asked the nurse who answered the door, pointing to my son’s clamped stump.

She looked completely confused. “Are you a patient here?” she asked.

“No, Ma’am,” I said. “I’m . . .” I couldn’t even say it: I’m a stage mother, and we’re on the set of a film, and I just got out of a different hospital this morning, and this is my newborn son, who’s playing the role of my elder child’s baby sister in the fake hospital that’s part of your real one.

“It’ll take too long to explain,” I said. “Can you do it?”

“Of course,” she said. Umbilical-cord clips are just like security tags in clothing stores, she told me; removing them requires special equipment. She would just have to locate a pair of clippers and then we could be on our way.

But we couldn’t leave, not yet, because Leo was needed for one more scene, this one with Vera and Sam cooing over him as Jacob looks on unhappily from afar. Several hours later, when the scene still hadn’t been shot, I handed my three-day-old son to a production assistant, told her to make sure everyone who came into contact with him used Purell, and found an empty hospital bed, onto which I collapsed. The next time I opened my eyes, Sam Rockwell was standing in the room, staring down at baby Leo asleep in his stroller, and whispering to Jacob.

“Your mom’s a real trouper for coming out here today,” he said.

“I know,” Jacob said. And I could tell that he meant it.

Rockwell showed up at the end of the People shoot in Park City. “How do you like Sundance?” he asked.

Jacob shrugged. “I haven’t really seen anything yet,” he said. We’d arrived by taxi from the airport at midnight the night before and had been picked up at our condo at 7 A.M. for the morning’s publicity blitz.

Finally, at 11:30 A.M., we were finished. And then we were dumped, unceremoniously, in the middle of Main Street. “You can find your way back to Deer Valley by yourselves, can’t you?” the publicist asked. She needed the car to take Sam and Vera to another interview.

“But I don’t know where our condo is,” I said. We’d also left both Jacob’s homework and our hats in the back seat, and it was starting to snow.

“Just take the shuttle,” the publicist yelled over her shoulder. And then she was gone.

“I’m cold,” Jacob said. “And she has my ‘Ender’s Game.’ ”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get us back. And I’ll get your book back, too.” I had once commandeered a donkey to get myself out of the Hindu Kush; how hard could it be to get from Park City to Deer Valley? Just then, a taxi full of people passed by, with a telephone number painted across it: 1-800-649-TAXI. I pulled out my cell phone and dialled. “Sorry, we’re out of taxis,” the dispatcher said, and hung up.

“Can we go skiing now?” Jacob asked. As natural as my son is at acting, he’s the exact opposite on a pair of skis, and I’d promised to try to get him up on the mountain for a lesson.

I looked at my watch. If we made it back to the condo in the next half hour, we would have time for lunch and one run down the slopes before we had to be back in Park City for the evening’s festivities. I decided that skiing would be the perfect antidote to his passive ride through the Hollywood glitz machine that morning. “Excuse me!” I shouted, flagging down an empty yellow school bus. “Can you take us to Deer Valley?”

“Hop on,” the driver said, laughing at our plight. He took us to Deer Valley, helped us find our condo, and wouldn’t let us pay. We walked a mile up to the slopes, rented skis and boots, bought new hats to replace the ones held hostage with Jacob’s homework, and snowplowed our way down a bunny trail called Success.

Back at the condo, we met up with Celia Weston, who plays Jacob’s grandmother in the film. She wanted to buy Sundance T-shirts for her godchildren, and Jacob wanted to buy a sweatshirt and a deck of cards, so the three of us headed to the souvenir shop before the pre-première party. It would have taken us all of five minutes to do our shopping, but Celia kept getting stopped by well-wishers on the street. “Maybe I should be a musician instead of an actor,” Jacob said. His father and I had recently taken him to a concert to see The Who and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “They can walk down the street and no one bothers them.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Look at John Lennon.”

“I bet Flea can walk down the street without anyone bothering him.”

“Who’s he?”

“See?”

I furrowed my brow, perplexed at his change of heart but understanding it as well. Children have passions that they seize and drop all the time. When Jacob was three, he spent every single day doing jigsaw puzzles. Then one day he simply stopped.

When we finally arrived at the cocktail party, not only did Jacob not have to worry about anyone recognizing him but the bouncer at the door wouldn’t let him in. “Utah law,” he said. “No kids near alcohol.”

“But he’s the star of the film,” one of the film’s producers said, standing on the other side of a velvet rope.

“Too bad,” the bouncer said. “We’ll get shut down.”

We finally persuaded the bouncer to let us sneak Jacob into the V.I.P. room, where we cordoned him off from the alcohol. When we left the party, the paparazzi were outside, and greeted Jacob with flashing bulbs. We were told to wait for Dave Matthews (who wrote a song for the film) to show up, because the people from the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition, who were hosting the party, needed a photograph of Jacob and Dave standing together against a backdrop that read, “THEWALL STREET JOURNAL WEEKEND EDITION.” Dave Matthews was mobbed by fans, and Jacob saw this and realized that, whether you’re a musician or an actor or an Olympic skier or a dancing goat, a certain degree of celebrity might come with the territory.

When the lights in the theatre dimmed and I saw my son’s face projected on the screen, I sat between Jacob and my friend Julie, holding their hands and crying. Not only because it finally struck me that my child was, in fact, an actor but because, in the eight months that had passed since the first frame was shot, Jacob had already changed. The boy on that screen was no longer him but a version of him, frozen in time.

“How did each of you get involved in doing the film?” a woman in the audience asked during the Q. & A. afterward. Sam Rockwell spoke of wanting to play the straight man for once; Vera Farmiga discussed the research she’d done into postpartum depression; Benoît Debie, the film’s cinematographer, talked about making light and shadow a character in the film. Then it was Jacob’s turn. “Um, my agent gave me the script,” he said with a shrug, and the audience burst out laughing.

After the screening, everyone met for another party, where Jacob promptly fell asleep on Vera Farmiga’s lap. I woke him only when I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman enter the room, because Jacob was miffed that he’d missed meeting the actor before the screening. We walked over to where Hoffman stood, chatting with Sam Rockwell. Jacob held out his hand as if he’d been working the room for decades, and told the actor how much he loved his work, a compliment that was graciously returned. “I only got to see part of ‘Magnolia,’ though,” Jacob said. “My mom turned it off when it became inappropriate.”

“Yeah, I’m the mother,” I said, my defenses high after a day’s worth of condescension. I was also preoccupied with the milk building up in my breasts, which I desperately needed to pump. For whatever reason, this kept happening whenever Sam Rockwell was around.

“That must have been some path you had to pull him down,” Hoffman said, and something about the word “pull” made me snap.

“I didn’t pull him,” I said. “I never wanted him to be an actor!”

He looked at me as if I were insane. “No, I meant—that was a difficult role he had to play, and it must have been hard for you, as a parent, to help him get to that place of coldness.” Here he was, the first stranger of the day to treat a stage mother with respect and empathy, and I had to go and bite his head off.

“Oh,” I said. Then I mumbled an awkward apology.

In the last scene of “Gypsy,” Rosalind Russell is dancing on an empty stage, in an empty theatre, acting out her vaudeville-star fantasy, when Natalie Wood appears from the wings, clapping. “You’d really have been something, Mother,” she says, “if you had someone to push you, like I did.” Then, in a final act of grace and humility, she invites her embarrassment of a mother to accompany her to the party after the show. I remembered that scene as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sam Rockwell walked toward the bar and I stood there with my son at his own after-party. I thought about how I might have responded to the conversational door that Hoffman had opened.

Yes, Mr. Hoffman, I should have said, that was some path I had to pull him down, but once he was there he was there all alone. That was his performance tonight. And I’m proud of him. ♦